Of Huns and Hans

On Saturday, I took a three hour bus trip, which ended up being 4.5 hours, to Jinshanling--a section of the Great Wall of China in Hebei Province. I went to the Summer Palace on Friday. More on that in a subsequent post. I want, first, to share the experience of visiting a place that was built starting in 1570 AD during the Ming Dynasty.

It really was remarkable. On the tour bus were Swiss, Austrians, and Germans, as well as an expatriate from Switzerland who was married to a woman from Lichtenstein. They live in South Africa and run an inn. There were also some Yanks and Brits, Flemish folk and Russians. We all enjoyed it immensely.

The remarkable "crooked house" construction at some points, which has stood the test of time, impressed me. Look closely at the upper reaches of the railing in this first picture and you will see that the bricks were not stacked atop each other, but rather leaned on top of each other. Each stone had to be carried up the mountain, which is why our funny little tour director said they call it the longest cemetery in the world. I saw no bones, but it required no imagination to muster the scene of poor men and donkeys hauling up stones for the protection of the empire from...the Mongolian invaders.

Though I am a bit reticent to complain, the annoying part of visiting this "wild" section of the wall was the large number of unemployed Mongolian farmers with backpacks full of T-shirts and Red Bull and bottled water for sale. They would follow you like fleas for ten minutes until you shewed them away, at which point they spent a minute trying to get you to buy a book or postcard as a memento. The going rate for a pint of water is about one yuan; these farmers were asking ten at some spots along the way.

Boy George, Why I am Not Going to Australia, etc.

Some of you who read my earlier post may have misinterpreted what I said. I am staying in China and not going to Australia. So why mention Australia at all? Because in the previously referenced Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, he says that he is moving to Australia because it is far, far away. I am not moving to Australia, because I don't want to be far, far away. With Skype and the Internet, I can stay in touch and we can remain virtually close.  "It is just not the same." I agree, but I will make a sojourn back to America in January or February 2012 and hope to see many of my faithful readers then.

I am staying involved with the Stop the Northern Pass! campaign and I am excited to see that Lynch is not going to be in a position to negotiate more bad deals for New Hampshire, like ripping up our forests and damaging our tourism industry by making the Granite State a highway for electrons bound to Massachusetts and Connecticut. Let's hope Gov. Pete Shumlin of Vermont (ahh, poor Vermont!) wakes up and realizes that getting hydro from the Maritimes is no better. The only way we are going to end our dependence on electricity is to halt the endless growth model and materialism that D. H. Lawrence decries in Lady Chatterley's Lover--the book I finished reading last week. (There is quite a bit more excitement in that book, by the way, if you have not read it.) We need to learn to say no, instead of, "Please, suh, can I have some more." (Yes, I know that is Dickens.)

I am staying here to accept a challenge more considerable than staying warm in the infamous Manchurian wintertime. (In other words, I am not staying here for a girl, as some have asked.) I will manage a new entity called The Culture Club. The late Jack Murray, who was the founder of Perfect English and its headmaster when I arrived here in February, endowed it with this name and so we will move forward thus, bowing, of course, to Boy George and the Second British invasion. A large number of important decisions have been made without my input, because I hemmed and hawed for months about whether to step up to the plate--two years seems, and seemed, a considerable commitment. One such decision was to inscribe on the marquee above our door the words Culture Club (even though we are THE Culture Club) in almost the same font that Coca-Cola uses. It is a sight to behold!

The purpose of The Culture Club is to provide a fun and entertaining environment to practice English with other non-native speakers while preparing our members and students with the necessary skills to travel abroad. In other words, I am going to show chop-stick users how to use the sinister fork. My mother's diligent training will finally pay off. If I am successful, hundreds, maybe thousands of Chinese people will know that the blade of the knife is supposed to face towards you when you set it down to the right of your plate.


In all seriousness, I will be working with a visiting student (Phillips Exeter Academy Class of 2011) and my colleagues at Perfect English Training School to develop programming and curriculum that will engage our existing clientele and new members. When the World Series rolls around (and the Red Sox are beating the Yankees), we will turn on the boob-tube, do reading-for-comprehension with Casey at the Bat, and practice listening with Abbot & Costello's Who's On First? Come Yuletide, we will teach carols and old standards. You get the idea.

For instance, it is terrifying for some Chinese to arrive in a foreign country and not know that you actually have to drive on the correct side of the road and stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk so we will familiarize people with America's car culture. To date, I have taught a couple dozen people how to play International Chess and Texas Hold 'em, as well as led a few discussions. It has been a lot of fun and will only get bigger and better.

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I had one. Everybody has to have one every once in a while.

Everybody else I work with seemingly got very sick from the moon-cakes that the school gave us for Mid-autumn Festival. (This is a guess and not an accusation.) Let me count my blessings. Not me. No, instead I chipped a tooth on God knows what--a rock, a nut shell. I was among the two people in fifty who got a bad moon cake, according to the government's newspaper.

I have not had running-water for over a week and got this amusing update from the person charged by the school with monitoring the situation, "I called the guy, he is looking for the broken pipe, there are 16 places he needs to find, but now he has just found 11. So he is not sure how long it will take." The guy? I dunno, but there is a notice in Chinese at the front door to the apartment building with a phone number for the guy. I have an image of a small, rodent-like miner crawling around in the dirt underneath our  seven story building. I feel worse for the families who need to cook and for the dozens of elderly citizens who live in this complex--the ones who sit in the courtyard all day on uncomfortable-looking folding canvas stools, playing mahjong and drying eggplants and peppers on large gauge screens.

After a week, I finally extricated my rank, foul, pink laundry from the front-loading washer, which has been in there since the electricity went out. When the electricity came back on there was no water so I, the famous laundry guy, neglected to do a g--d-- thing about it. Live and learn. I had to drain the water out the emergency drainage valve before I opened the door. Now the bathroom smells like five day old wet laundry. It is all ruined and pink from the floral sheets that were supplied when I moved here in February. No matter how many times I wash them they still turn everything pink.

I am not going to Australia, though. I will spend two more years in China. You heard it here first. Tune in next time to find out why.

Happy September 11th!

Happy? No, of course not, but here in China--this year--it is sandwiched between Teacher's Day and Mid-Autumn Festival. In fact, for me it is already Monday, a national holiday....which I discuss at length in the second half of this post.

While I refuse to discuss Taiwan policy per se, Tibet politics, or Falun Gong (which originated here in Changchun), I did have a fascinating conversation yesterday about propaganda with one of my classes. It seems that a large number of Chinese, of all ages and walks of life, believe that the US government had adequate warning of the planned attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001 and decided to do nothing. These theorists see the orderly collapsing of the buildings in on themselves as evidence of a conspiracy, perhaps providing the US an excuse to go to war with Afghanistan. Why? Because of oil, one student claimed--conflating the strategic goals in Kuwait and Iraq.

The conversation then moved to the idea that Koreans are taught in school that Confucius was Korean. (The root of this tale seems to be that an ancestor of Confucius went to Korea and lived there so he can be said to have a Korean ancestor.)

It seems also to be a universally understood fact that the Koreans want to expropriate "intangible cultural heritage" by claiming the Dragon Boat Festival as theirs. The idea that two nations could have festivals comprising vastly different traditions, but the same name, was unthinkable.

There is a joke about Koreans that every schoolchild in China seems to know. I cited this as an example of subtle propaganda. The joke is that in the wake of the Japanese nuclear disaster, Korea sent a five-person rescue team with two rescue dogs. One of the dogs wandered off so, instead of helping, the team spent the day looking for the dog. The implication of the joke is that the dog was eaten. One of my students told me emphatically that because dog is a specialty dish in Korea it is just common-sense that the Koreans were the first people to eat dog. She was shocked when I revealed that there is evidence that people in certain parts of China people were eating dog 900 years prior to the Koreans.

Finally, it was said that Japanese textbooks assert sovereignty over the Pinnacle Islands (also called Senkaku Shotō by the Japanese and Diàoyútái Qúndǎo by the Chinese) and that this is a serious issue. While this is tangentially a Taiwan issue, what I found stunning was how a complex issue, involving interpretation of a post-WWII treaty, has been boiled down in the minds of most Chinese citizens to a supposedly brazen attempt at brainwashing Japanese children by means of "incorrect" geography textbooks.


More about Today's Moon Festival

Shops selling mooncakes before the festival often
display pictures of Chang'e floating to the moon.

Traditionally on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomelos under the moon together. They honor Chang'e by burning incense. Chang'e is the lady in the moon, who is much like the Western notion of a man in the moon. She is the Chinese goddess of the moon and plays a significant role in Chinese literature, including:

•  a Chinese TV period drama titled Moon Fairy, starring Singapore actors Fann Wong and Christopher Lee.

• Chang'e appears in Wu Cheng'en's novel Journey to the West and also TV adaptions of the novel. Her story slightly changed from her going to the Moon on her first try to going to the heavens, and would later be rewarded to live in the Moon after an incident which involved her and Zhu Bajie.

• Mao Zedong mentions Chang'e in his most famous poem, Broken is the High Column, about his first wife Yang Kaihui, who perished at the hands of the Kuomintang warlord He Jian.

• The legend of Lady Chang-O plays a prominent role in Amy Tan's children's book, The Moon Lady, retold from her more adult novel The Joy Luck Club.

Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:

• Erect the Mid-Autumn Festival.(树中秋，竖中秋，in China,树 and 竖 are homophones）Traditional people hang lanterns on a bamboo pole and put them on a high point, such as a roof, tree, terrace, etc. It is a custom in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, etc. In fact, they even float them into the air which is a fire hazard that has been banned in many modern cities (though not Changchun, I understand).

• Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members, according to Wikipedia, as well as wearing pomelo rinds on their heads, according to CCTV; and 

• Fire Dragon Dances

The best part of the festival is the moon-cakes. Whole shops crop up for a week and vendors pepper the streets pedaling these sweet concoctions. I have eaten a half dozen different flavors. The most traditional is filled with red beans and pine nuts. I had a corn one and a strawberry one yesterday. Many people don't like them.

I am still on a search for one made with blue-cheese filling. There has got to be a market there!

I will spend the evening with my girlfriend and her family. I may spend a few hours watching them cook and prepare. I will go bearing a pomelo, some mooncakes, and sundry other fruits. It should be great fun.

China's Military Build-up

Occasionally, I will re-post an article from the Old Grey Lady or some other reputable source. Today, I would like to share three articles. The first is by a Princeton professor--not Krugman or his colleague in the econ dept., Alan Kreuger, but a politics prof named Aaron Friedberg. It is entitled China's Challenge at Sea. It is short and insightful.  

The Atlantic's feature articles are never short, but almost always of stunning caliber. I would like to recommend the most recent installment by James Fallows, Arab Spring, Chinese Winter, which is as inciting as it is insightful. Finally, I would like to recommend a month old op-ed from the New York Times by Admiral Mike Mullen, entitled A Step Toward Trust with China.

It is easy to see how the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff's remarks relate to the Princeton professors piece on naval strategy, but I think the Fallows piece is also related. Fallows mentions that the police and internal security budgets outstrip those of the military:

enforcement around the country has been left mainly to regular police, typically in their dark-blue uniforms; the much-feared “urban management” patrols known as chengguan, also in dark blue; large reserve armies of plainclothesmen; and many other less visible parts of the state’s internal-security apparatus, which now has a larger budget than China’s regular military does.[my emphasis]

As I wrote the first part of this, I was sitting in a teacher's room looking out at a quadrangle with three thousand students "doing exercises" to marshal music. This is the third best high school in China and the students are marching like soldiers during their twenty minutes of free time, but none of them know the name of this piece of music that they hear everyday. Natural curiosity is nearly non-existent among these over-tired students.

I woke the other morning to the sound of drilling students in the courtyard of Changchun Institute of Technology. Basic training is required of all 18 year-old males in China.

The following compulsory service options are available as of January 2006:

• Enlisted military service (士兵役): 12 months of active duty enlisted military service in one of the four branches of the ROC Armed Forces.
• Alternative service (替代役): 12 months of public safety or community service related work under the MOI, usually in the police, fire department, public clinics, local government offices, or as teachers in rural areas. Various billets are available only to draftees with related qualifications.
• National defense service (國防役): Available to draftees with advanced degrees, particularly in the sciences and engineering, who upon selection, receive 3 months of officer training culminating in a commission as an officer in the reserves, followed by four years of employment in a government or academic research institution such as the Academia Sinica or Industrial Technology Research Institute.

If I ask my students here whether China is a super-power they invariably say that it will be, but is not yet because it hasn't the military prowess. That is changing quickly. Just this week, China announced that it plans to have three aircraft carriers at sea by 2030. England, France and Russia each have one. The United States has a dozen on active duty.

A miniature golden replica of China's first aircraft carrier is on display at the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution in Beijing, Sept 6, 2011. The carrier was bought from the Ukraine and is being refitted for scientific research and training purposes. The replica is made of pure gold, at a scale of 1 to 1680.[Photo/CFP]

The birthday party at a favorite Muslim restaurant of mine was fun. There were probably forty people there and we ate 800RMB of pork-free food, but these Muslims know how to party so there was beer. Jason was grateful for that and I was grateful to Jason who organized the event (i.e. collected RSVPs).

There was a huge haul of fruit. We ate ten dragon fruits sliced up and many plums at the event and all of the good juice was slurped up, too, but I went home loaded to the gills with a durian, which I just tackled because my apartment was starting to smell; two star fruit, a melon; a pomelo, which I don't know how to tackle; grapes; a couple of pineapples; and four sapodillas.  I laid all of them out on my dining room table so that you could see.

I also was given a bracelet of some Buddhist creature with no anus, which is supposed to make me rich; a pretty set of chopsticks with a spoon; a couple of high-quality mooncakes; and a gorgeous calendar that I had contemplated buying at the Expo earlier in the day. You can see also some beautiful flowers that were sprinkled with gold dust, which I proceeded to sprinkle on one of the guests. A German friend brought me a children's Bible in Chinese and English and an artist friend of mine brought me a silk-screened shirt that her students made.

"It's my birthday too, yeah"

Today is my twin sister's birthday. She will turn 37. I turned 38, because in China you are one when you are born. We spoke on Skype this morning and I joked that I was not just ten minutes older, because it will not be September 7th for another half hour on the East Coast.

In China, you are supposed to have one long-life noodle for your birthday so I abandoned plans for a fancy Western breakfast with my girlfriend and had noodles. We will share lunch together, too, and dinner with twenty to forty people at a Muslim restaurant. People will bring obscure fruit, red envelopes full of money (if they can't read the invitation, which asks them not to) and drink white liquor. It may end with a sojourn to KTV, or karaoke.

This afternoon, I will spend some time showing Shannon the wonders of Changchun. Who, you might ask? Shannon is a recent Phillips Exeter Academy graduate (my alma mater) who has taken four years of Chinese. She is a dear friend's daughter and will be here for six months to help me with my work. Yesterday, I took her to nearby South Lake Park and she was amazed by the acres of lotus leaves and blossoms.

Everybody stared at the two foreigners, which she did not find off-putting, but like her tour guide, rather endearing and amusing. "They are the most beautiful babies," she said. I objected strenuously and she looked puzzled. I then said that inter-racial ones are more beautiful.

I spent the morning reading a dirty book (Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence) and drinking fancy coffee out of a pretty tea cup at TongRen Bookstore. Life is good.

Thanks for the birthday wishes on Facebook and QQ and by text. Hope you are enjoying the blog posts.